The 28nm GPU chip was manufactured on the 22nd week of 2013 (in late May) in Taiwan. It is revision A1. The GPU die is 561 sq. mm large.

The base GPU frequency of the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX is pre-overclocked by 104 MHz (+12.1% above the reference card’s) to 967 MHz. The boost clock rate is supposed to be 1020 MHz but, according to our monitoring data, it reached as high as 1097 MHz with maximum power and temperature targets. That’s some substantial factory overclocking, we must admit. However, it is not the record for the three GeForce GTX 780s we’re discussing today. According to GPU-Z, the ASIC quality of the EVGA’s GPU is 73.0%:

Running a little ahead, we can tell you that it is the best ASIC quality among the six GeForce GTX 780s we've tested.

They are clocked at their rated frequency of 6008 MHz. Unfortunately, most manufacturers do not try to overclock this memory although its frequency potential is high. Coupled with the 384-bit bus, such overclocking would ensure substantial performance benefits. It might be clocked at 6600 MHz safely enough to make the graphics card faster at high visual quality settings with some type of antialiasing.

Thus, the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX has the following specs:

The card features the Active Cooling Xtreme system developed by EVGA. Not very sophisticated in design, it is cleverly and neatly implemented. The cooler consists of a nickel-plated aluminum heatsink with fans, a plastic casing, and a heat-spreading plate:

There are four 8mm and one 6mm heat pipe in the heatsink. They are soldered to the copper base:

Some of the heatsink fins are perforated in a tessellated pattern:

This must have been done to make the air flow more turbulent and thus increase the heat transfer efficiency.

The heatsink is cooled by a pair of identical 92mm fans from Power Logic.

The PLA09215B12H fans run on dual ball bearings, so the manufacturer guarantees them to last for at least 12 years. Thanks to PWM-based regulation, the speed of the fans can vary in a range of 1000 to 3300 RPM. So, EVGA’s cooler looks promising but let’s check it out in practice before jumping to conclusions.

Hereinafter, to check out the cards temperatures we used five runs of the pretty resource-hungry Aliens vs. Predator (2010) benchmark at the highest visual quality settings, at a resolution of 2560x1440 pixels. We used 16x anisotropic filtering but no MSAA 4x:

We used MSI Afterburner 3.0.0 beta 14 and GPU-Z version 0.7.2 for monitoring of temperatures inside the closed system case, which configuration is discussed in detail in the corresponding chapter of the roundup. All tests were performed at 26°C room temperature.

Here is how efficient EVGA’s ACX cooler is with its fans regulated automatically and at their maximum speed:

Auto fan mode

Maximum fan speed

The noise factor apart, the cooler seems to cope with its job well enough. In the automatic fan regulation mode, the speed of the fans would peak up to 2100 RPM and the GPU was 74°C hot. At the maximum speed of 3330 RPM, the cooler kept the temperature at 62°C. So, despite the increased GPU clock rates, the ACX cooler is definitely more efficient than the reference cooler from Nvidia and, for example, than the Twin Frozr IV from MSI.

In our overclockability test, we increased the GPU and memory frequencies of the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Superclocked ACX by 70 and 1320 MHz, respectively.

The resulting clock rates were 1037/1090/7328 MHz, which is very good for a top-end graphics card.

The peak GPU frequency of the overclocked card was 1163 MHz. The GPU was 78°C hot with the fans rotating at 2190 RPM.

We guess that’s a good result, but let’s first see what the other two products have to show us.